Modern datacenters include large numbers of physical and virtual entities. Examples of physical entities may include application servers, storage servers, load balancers, network interface cards (NICs), firewalls, switches, routers, etc. Almost any of these physical entities can be virtualized as software entities, such as virtual machines (VM), virtual firewalls, virtual switches, virtual routers, vlans (VLANs), virtual extensible local area networks (VXLANs), etc.
Virtual entities increase the complexities of monitoring, troubleshooting, searching characteristics of, and visualizing these dynamically configurable networks. Existing systems may only monitor and collect data for a subset of physical or virtual components within the datacenter. Existing systems also may not be able to understand these new architectures, entities, and the relationships between these entities. Thus, present systems may not effectively monitor or visualize the physical and virtual entity configurations within modern datacenters, and may not provide adequate capabilities to search characteristics of such datacenters.
Additional aspects and advantages of this invention will be apparent from the following detailed description of preferred embodiments, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.